This post I will talk about my journey getting a domain and setting it up!
Finding a domain and domain registrar can be a real pain. If you go and search domain registrar on google you will get spammed with ads from companies like GoDaddy, SquareSpace, Wix, and many more. Now I'm not saying any of those companies are bad or not something that I would recommend. I will say if you want to do something like my current website being mostly a static page with only some blogs or photos and have some time to put a small amount of work in I would not recommend any of the sites I stated earlier. The big sites like SquareSpace and Wix provide a very good service to a lot of people. The main features of websites like Wix is their website builder and provide domain registration as a side business. This gives a bit of an issue because they can charge a huge amount if you just want a domain and not use their other services. This leads me into what I did to find a service that doesn't charge a ton for what I wanted.
After spending way too long searching around for best prices for the domain I wanted I finally found some useful information. I heard from somewhere the price for a domain is set at a minimum price from ICANN (the company that overlooks many of the registrars of .com and .orgs) which sets the price for what a registrar will charge me. After hearing that I started to look into websites that focused solely on providing domains and nothing else. After focusing my search I found two services that fit my requirements, Google Domains and Name Cheap. I didn't look much into Name Cheap mostly because I took a look into what Google Domains offered and the price they charged was very reasonable for me and fit all my needs plus some more.
Google Domains offered the best solution for my needs by far. First off I already am a pretty avid user of google products (whether that be good or not). Which meant I had a google account and some level of understanding how their services would work. So finding Google Domains already put it high up on my list. Looking further into what they provide with a domain, fit it snuggly into where I would be spending my money. Google Domains has a few different packages based on your needs. They have just the domain, a google workspaces deal, and some other packages that I didn't look at. With just the base domain they let you do all the things you need to do with a domain. They offer names servers hosted by google to allow you to directly edit DNS for the domain right from the same place. They also offer synthetic records, which are records that can do some funky things. These synthetic records are what really keeps me renewing with google every year because they allow for email forwarding to your gmail account. This allows me to have every email sent to @nd0905.com direct to my gmail inbox without having to set up any mail servers. Google domains also all come with free whois privacy protection as well as domain transfer protection, both needed for me. Overall this service which I pay about a dollar a month for my domain gives me a ton of features and keeps me coming back every year.
Now we have a domain and some idea of what to do with it. It's time to start making it do what you want it to do. First off a deep thought of what you need to do and how you want to do it needs to happen. For my personal use I knew I wanted to take advantage of the free email forwarding solution google presented to me. When I was first getting things working I thought I had to use google’s dns service to keep email forwarding working. I have now learned I was wrong on that thought. I also had been a big fan of Cloudflare and what they do as ddos protection and security rules. So I took a leap and transferred my name servers to services. This was a simple step and starting the process on Cloudflare's side it allows for easy transfer of all DNS rules. This transfer is what showed me that the email forwarding would still work as the proper mx records were transferred over without me having to do it manually. Once I had things transferred and email forwarding set up I put in all my records for my website to point at github as their documentation states and put in the records to point to my other services as I needed. Life was good. While I was looking around all the settings cloud flare had for DNS I found the security section and put in some geolocation blocking. This did warn me that for it to work it had to have dns record proxied through cloud flare. I was okay with this for my website as I have no need to get the true IP address of the github servers and was fine getting routed around to get to my website. For some other services I didn't want the proxy on because I knew this could mess up inner working of some services, like the google email forwarding. Overall I would recommend taking a look through all the settings that Google or Cloudflare or whatever DNS provider you use offers to make sure you are getting the best results from what is offered.
To wrap up what I covered in this post, I talked about finding a domain registrar that offers what you need, like a fancy website builder or just a plain domain. I then went on to talk about my preferred domain registrar and why I think they offer an amazing deal. By the way I am in no way sponsored by Google, I just like the product. Finally I talked about what DNS provider I use and the reasons I use Cloudflare. If you are looking for a domain and DNS provider I would recommend doing what I do. It gives an amazing price for free email forwarding and all the fancy services that you love to see on major websites. If you have any questions on why I did what I did or how I did any particular portion please send me an email and I will get back to you as soon as I can. This has been Nick, thank you for reading my post.